When Apps Meet Cloud Storage: Tectonic Shift Ahead

There have been two major developments in the consumer web in the last couple of weeks. Google announced the integration of GMail with Google Drive and Dropbox announced Dropbox chooser. With the GMail-Google Drive integrations, GMail users can now send links to files up to 10GB stored on Google Drive from inside the GMail interface. With Dropbox chooser, websites developers can allow users to access the photos, docs and videos in their Dropbox from within the web application.

While both announcements garnered their fair share of press attention, most failed to notice that these developments are only the tip of the iceberg with respect to the tectonic shifts afoot in the cloud computing space.

This integration of consumer cloud storage with the applications represents an interesting trend -- one that Filepicker.io, my company, has been actively catalyzing and aggressively pushing forth on for a while now.

So what are these tectonic shifts, and what does it means to enterprise and independent developers, as well as ultimately to users?

Implication #1: Storage Meets Apps: Death of Local Storage

Notice that both the Dropbox and the Google Drive developments are a marriage of storage with applications. Users are increasingly storing their content online in platforms and that means the death of local storage is near.

Facebook has become my defacto online photo hard drive, while friends with DSLRs use Picasa or Flickr for this purpose. I’ve passively collected a lot of family photos and work PDFs in Gmail. Evernote stores my memories. Google Docs, Box, Alfresco and Office Live have my documents. Even Youtube or Vimeo keeps a cache of my favorite videos. Users don’t realize it fully yet but the content you care about lives online now.

For example, take Filepicker.io’s customer WeVideo. They are an online platform for collaborative video production in the cloud that connects your web editing and your mobile device's camera. WeVideo works on any browser -- no need for software installs and updates. It’s a perfect replacement for iMovie (Apple’s installable video editor).

But what happens when a user want to edit that video in Google Drive or Dropbox or Facebook or Youtube? Or wants to save it back to one of those sources? Instead of forcing the user to jump through the hoops, WeVideo integrates these sources directly within the application using Filepicker.io’s cloud content gateway so that users can upload from, edit and save their content anywhere.

Incorporating a cloud gateway like Filepicker.io also affects the sources of content that users upload. Some customers now have over 70% of uploads starting from the cloud instead of from the hard drive, up from 20% several months ago.

Now that user data is available inside the application, the user’s online behavior will change as well. From what we have seen, the seamless user experience of not having to download data out of storage platforms like Dropbox will alter the amount of content that you share on the web.

Take, for example, Fitocracy. Fitocracy is fitness-based social network. They make fitness a more fun, more addictive experience with challenges that push your boundaries.

Fitocracy had implemented embedding of images in their status updates section. If users wanted to use a photo from their Facebook, they would have to go to Facebook, hit "Copy Image URL" and paste it into Fitocracy's status update box. No one used it. It was too hard.

That’s when Kasra Rahjerdi from Fitocracy realized that there’s got to be a better way to engineer user behavior on the site. Fitocracy added a dedicated "Add Photo" button powered by Filepicker.io infrastructure so people can add photos from anywhere on the web.

Result: user engagement went up by a factor of 10.

Implication#2: New Architectures Will Emerge for Multi-Platform Apps

Dropbox, Google Drive, Microsoft, Box, Apple each have very strong ecosystems, network effects and deep pockets. This market is unlikely to shake out and consolidate to one or two vendors anytime soon. Since the storage market is going to remain segmented, users are going to have their files scattered across many platforms; therefore, the interoperability between these platforms matters. Thus, there is going to be a need for a cross-platform content interoperability layer.

Web and mobile applications that build cross platform will be designed on this new interoperability layer. The cornerstone of this layer is the architectural construct of pass-by-reference.

For any object of substantial size, passing around a reference to the object is far more reasonable and resource efficient than passing around the object itself. Programming aside, consider how I might send you money: I could go to the bank, withdraw cash, and send it to you via USPS, so that you can then take the money and deposit it in your bank. Or, I could do a wire transfer, where I essentially send you a reference to the money, which makes things a whole lot faster and easier. Pass by reference is like doing a wire transfer of your content i.e.sending around URLs rather than sending the file itself.

Filepicker.io is combines the pass-by-reference construct with better upload file tranmission algorithms. Based on this architecture, Filepicker.io customer's like Plangrid, an app to manage Blueprints on the iPad, has reported blazing fast upload speeds. Up to four times faster than conventional architectures.

We are pushing this new architectural construct forward with our read, write, convert, synchronize APIs such that any data anywhere on the web can be remotely managed and controlled. This new architecture will save application developers building content-centric consumer websites, SaaS software and enterprise workflow software from having to write custom server side code.

The End of Uploading/Downloading

With products like the Dropbox chooser and Gmail-Google Drive integration surfacing, it’s clear that the industry is moving forward, that consumers will soon expect their applications to work with directly cloud storage. We are in the beginning phases in the next wave of change; the notion of the web as a platform. Local storage will die, user experience and user behavior online will change and a new interoperability layer will emerge for multi-platform apps.

As we and others push this notion of interoperability forward, we’ll see a web where from any device, a user can log in to their accounts, view, store, edit, and share their content, all online, without ever needing to download or upload.

Anand is the co-founder of Filepicker.io, a Y Combinator company from MIT.